State Rep. Pringle: Nothing in Voting Rights Act establishes a right to have protected class congressional representation proportionate to the population

State Rep. Chris Pringle (R-Mobile) rejects the notion that given Alabama’s demographics reflect a 27% African-American representation, the state’s congressional representation should line up proportionately with that number as well.

During an appearance on Mobile radio FM Talk 106.5’s “The Jeff Poor Show” on Friday, Pringle, the co-chairman of the Permanent Legislative Committee on Reapportionment, defended the congressional districts drawn by the legislature in a special session last year.

Those maps were rejected by a three-judge lower court panel ruling, which the U.S. Supreme Court eventually stayed.

Pringle explained that the maps the legislature passed into law were roughly the same as those that had survived legal challenges over the past few decades.

“The congressional plan as you know it is really kind of the Reed-Buskey plan that was implemented by the federal courts in 1992,” he said. “And all we’ve done since then — we’ve tweaked them based on the population shifts and made the districts zero deviation. And our attorney is the same attorney the Democrats used when they were in the majority when they were drawing districts. So, our guidelines have come from the 90s forward, and all we do is adjust them based on new court rulings.”

“So everything we did, we did based on what the lawyers told us was legal,” he continued. “This three-judge panel — they have reinterpreted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in a way we never expected them to do. They have now said that because there’s 27% African-American in the state of Alabama, they deserve a second district just because of that. But Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — nothing in this section establishes a right to have members of a protected class elected to numbers equal to their proportion of the population.”

“And now this court has told us we have to elect minorities in proportion to the population even though Section 2 clearly says nothing says they have to be elected in proportion,” Pringle added.

@Jeff_Poor is a graduate of Auburn University and the University of South Alabama, the editor of Breitbart TV, a columnist for Mobile’s Lagniappe Weekly, and host of Mobile’s “The Jeff Poor Show” from 9 a.m.-12 p.m. on FM Talk 106.5.